Cold
by Dark Romeo
Summary: An Imperial Guardsmen's recollection of the Tyranid menace.


**Cold:**

**By Liam Jackson**

**I dont own Warhanner 40k or anything to do with em. I dont own GamesWorkshop ****and have never worked there. This is a work of inspired Fiction. Dont sue. Seriously, ****I know what you people are like. It's not worth it to sue me anyway, if i had money ****would I be writing fanfiction?**

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Cold.

Thats the one thing that you can really think about. How cold it is outside. And you spend a lot of time outside, too much for anyones liking. I've seen the new recruits think they can handle it, and nearly half of them end up shivering and breaking down by the fourth day. Can't say I blame them really, that's what I did when I got here. Some of the more 'veteran' troopers think its their job to point out that such breakdowns aren't meant for the battlefield, but there aren't many. Not many that are at our rank at least. I think the truth is we all broke down long ago, and now we're just numb from that.

Its not only the cold, its the snow. It gets in everything, makes you wet, and when its flying hard at your face its not as soft and puffy as it's made out to be. There's zero visiblity in the middle of a hard snowstorm, and when there's a multiarmed horror running straight at you, thats anything but needed. Remember though, it dosen't effect them, it's your smell that singles you out.

And that would be the real sanity killer. The bugs. Oh sure, the commissar can call them 'Tyranids' and intelligence can explain excactly how advanced their social structure may be, but to us they're just 'bugs'. Oversized ants. Big, ugly ants with claws in places you didn't think possible. Teeth that look almost iron covered, eyes that have that crazed look of a starving animal, and to top it all off, a smell that would send anyman to an early grave.

Yup, they're hard fuckers thats for sure. And they're smarter then they look. For the first day or two it was excactly like we thought it would be. Hordes of the things assaulting the walls of the complex, literally millions of razor sharp manibles and gnashing teeth moving, screaming for blood. It scares the crap outta you, there aint a man alive that wouldn't wanna just lay on the floor and dig a deep, deep hole to get away from that. Some poor buggers did, and the commissar's put a bullet in all of them. 'Disgrace to the Emperor' they called it. I call it the survival instinct, but more on that later.

So anyway, for the first few days, it was anarchy. You were trained to find a target and shoot it in the head. With these bugs that poses a little problem. For one, theres so many of them at once that finding just one to shoot is impossible. And even if you do, shooting it in the _head _is a feat in itself, on a creature who's head is usually in a place it's not supposed to be. Even if you hit in the head, sometimes that's not even where the brain is on the damn things and it keeps scurrying at you. Experimentation is neccasary, but ultimately deadly. In those two days you just shot in their general direction and one sometimes went down. Or not. Luck works out like that.

Speaking of luck, it was a god send that the Space Marines arrived when they did. Tyranids on their own are fast, and can rip you apart with their bare...whatever, but thats why man was blessed with firearms. Its just when they have the numbers over you that your in trouble, and by trouble I mean the type that ends with you having your heart ripped from your chest and your small intestine used as dental floss. That's the fix I found myself in the last day of the 'big assault'. As I said, the 'bugs' had jsut thrown themselves at us like a clerk to the pavement fifty stories below. The bodies were piling up on both sides, and they had more replacements then we did. We slowly had to fall back, give up a trench one at a time, till all of us ended up crammed into the complex itself. I saw a bunch of new recruits, probably no older then fifteen, get eaten alive. I could go into details, but it's not something I want to bring up anytime soon in such grandeur. Im just glad I was watching it and not living it. It was at that moment, when all of us started praying to whatever god we _really _beleived in to get off their heavenly arse and help us out, that they came screaming outta the sky.

It was beautiful, in a horrible and explosive sorta way. Watching pods bigger then my house rocket into the ground and send insect guts and limbs spraying everywhere. This went on for about five minets, and then there was this silence. Even the bug's stayed quite for a few seconds. Then they started a god awful rucuss. It was like they realized what was happening as soon as we did and wanted to neutralize the problem...NOW!

The Marines kicked down their pods doors and let em have it. It was incredible. Men that stood at _least _8 foot cocked rifles bigger then me and somehow managed to fire them with barely any recoil. They say the sound of bolter fire is like bolts of lightning cracking at a very close space, but I thought it was more like someone had taken a nuclear explosion and turned all the dials to 11, then turned volume up to 12. Like angels more descended into the fray with their jump packs, and took on the 'bug' menace with only their swords. No amount of money, glory or women could make me do that, not willingly at least. But they did, and they were good at it. I saw one single handedly kill broods of the things without batting an eye, and another just dropped his weapons and started fighting with his knuckles like it was a bar. He ripped a few in half like they where paper over his head, and all the while just kept that same determined look on his face.

Then our commisar got it into his head that THEY needed OUR help. When he gave the order to charge, I almost shouted back to go help them himself. I did not want to go into what looked like the bloodiest battle in all of existance without at least having a drink beforehand. But up I got anyway, it was a job afterall.

The fighting didn't last for too much longer. The Space marines gave the bugs one hell of a whooping then their tanks landed. We all stood our safe distance as they were forced to withdraw. The missiles and mortars blew the bugs away quicker then my eyes could follow. And then afterwards, the heat blew their guts and 'peices' into the air, so it floated around you like some twisted version of a parade.

After that, it was clean up duty. Space Marines are apparantly 'too important' for clean up duty, and of course MY platoon always gets chosen for this sorta stuff. We lost another greenback that day, the damn kid just wouldn't listen to us when we told him to stand back. Said he wanted to make sure they were dead, and the only way to do that is to look em right in the dead eye. That was when the 'corpse' he was leaning over got back up and sunk its teeth into his face. He didn't die instantly either. There is no sound more horrible then a man trying to scream without a mouth.

Clean up duty is simple, you walk around the battle field, and you make sure that all of them are good and dead. Cant have a survivor getting back up in the middle of the night and going beserk while your halfway through rations.

After clean up duty, it was time to repair the defences, set up the bolter turrets, replant mines, real grunt work. The kind of stuff that Space Marines and commisars dont have to dirty their hands with. It was hard work as well, but I honestly thought that our problems were over. The almighty Space Marines were here, the ultimate bastion against the alien menace that threatened humanity. How wrong I was.

The force of Space Marines were not expecting a long stay, they were needed in the defence of the main fortress, and the relics in that thing are apparantly more important then our lives. They did leave behind one of their number, and a few of their scouts apparantly stalk the area giving us recon. Some sort of test apparantly, if my understanding is correct.

So after that, there were no more mass attacks on the bugs behalf. For a moment we actually thought they had forgotten our little collection of bunkers and decided to all go for the fortress where the big kill is. It was then that people started to go missing. Patrols stopped coming back, gone without a trace. Supply trucks would never show up, the power was cut again and again. The turrents where attacked in the middle of the night, one at a time, breaking them systematically, and every day I had to trudge out there and fix them. The worst was the raids, small concentrated attacks on the trenches, each time the bugs would pull back when we became fully mobilized. In the night you could see their shadows moving in the distance, moving in ways that are not meant to be done. They would make calls all night so you couldn't sleep, alien calls that chilled you too the bone.

They were tiring us out, running us to the ground. Slowly but surely starving us of food and medical aid until we were too weak to fight.

And now it is silent.

Its not the calm type of silence though, its the kind of silence that just lets you know that your going to get hit by something huge. Something wicked this way comes alright, its big and scary and more fucked up then an insane psykers nightmare. This is what those damn bugs want us to feel. Fear. And let me tell you, I feel it.

That, and the cold.

THE END

AN: Just something I cooked up in my spare time, wanted to try and do something short and sweet about the Imperial Guard. May do more of these sort of stories, each one from a different races point of view.

Jackson


End file.
